reuters

all africa.com

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The United Nations says it has not received a single pledge of money in response to its emergency appeal for food aid for Niger.
The UN has called for $16.2m to buy food for more than 3.5m people suffering from recurring drought and a locust infestation. Some 150,000 young children are said to be severely malnourished already.

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Nationally more than three million people are at risk of hunger following successive droughts and swarms of locusts that stripped sparse vegetation bare across the arid country last year, according to Nigerien authorities. About 15 percent of the West African nation's average cereal production and almost 40 percent of the country's livestock was lost in a country that is ranked the second poorest in the world by the UN and some 63 percent of the 12-million strong population live on less than a dollar a day.

NGOs in the field have recorded alarming malnutrition rates in children under five and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said that in the southern Tahoua and Maradi districts of Niger, one in five children are at risk of serious malnutrition.

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We need your practical advice, so thanks.

A tangent, but a horribly ironic one: whenever I hear the word "Niger" now, I think immediately of the Washington political scam/scandal involving Ambassador Wilson, who was sent to, of all places, Niger, to investigate reports that the government there was supplying "yellow-cake" to Saddam Hussein for his mythical WMD.

People here mostly don't even know about the famine.

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Johanne Sekkenes, the mission head of MSF which is mounting the biggest emergency exercise in its history in Niger, says the current emergency could have been avoided. "This is not a famine, in the Somalian way," she said. "The harvest was bad in 2004 and the millet granaries are empty. Yet there is food on the markets. The trouble is that the price of the food is beyond anyone's reach.

Ms Sekkenes said the International Monetary Fund and the European Union had pressed Niger too hard to implement a structural adjustment programme. "No sooner had the government been re-elected [this year] than it was obliged to introduce 19 per cent VAT on basic foodstuffs. At the same time, as part of the policy, emergency grain reserves were abolished."

International agencies say the price of basic foodstuffs has risen between 75 and 89 per cent over the past five years. At the same time, the sale price of livestock - the main income source of the country's nomadic herders - has fallen by about 25 per cent.

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This from Anthroblogogy, I found the numbers sickening to say the least, though not unexpected...

"Committee on International Rerlations' Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations (Washington)
Publication Date: July 1, 2005

In his testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2004, Ghanaian Professor George Ayittey from the American University documented the following amounts of grand embezzlement among African leaders [4]:

* General Sani Abacha of Nigeria: $20 billion
* President Félix Houphoüet-Boigny of Ivory Coast: $6 billion
* General Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria: $5 billion
* President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire: $4 billion
* President Mousa Traore of Mali: $2 billion
* President Henri Bedie of Ivory Coast: $300 million
* President Denis N'guesso of Congo: $200 million
* President Omar Bongo of Gabon: $80 million
* President Paul Biya of Cameroon: $70 million
* President Haile Mariam of Ethiopia: $30 million

In total, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo estimated, “corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the [four] decades since independence.” [5] Corrupt leaders do not discriminate between foreign aid and other revenue (such as oil wealth) when stocking their Swiss bank accounts, so it is nearly impossible to discern how much pilfered loot came directly from development funds. In many cases, however, it is clear that foreign aid’s only enduring gift to many Africans is a large debt burden, a fact that prompted Lord Bauer to quip that foreign aid was “an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”[6]"

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do you think that the IMF was right to insist on:

Pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, was accused of wreckless experimentation on Nigerian children with a controversial meningitis vaccine. Several children died. It was not known who of their illiterate families signed written consent forms for the backdoor drug trials, and proven drugs like Cuba's own meningitis vaccine were witheld from the study.

This man, Patrice Lumumba, was their hope for a united Africa.

[ 01 August 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

hence, can't criticise the IMF/World Bank, especially if brown sits on WB committees, and the US runs the IMF.

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Hunger is spreading in Africa

Food aid is beginning to flow into Niger, where some 2.9 million people face food shortages.

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Reasons include the relentless spread of desert and drought, high population growth, bad governance, and the world community's flawed hunger-response system.

[snip]

Yet amid the growing focus on Niger's woes, the broader fact is that the country's 2.9 million hungry people are just a fraction of Africa's 31.1 million food-deprived masses, scattered across Sudan's Darfur region, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Uganda, and elsewhere. Despite progress in boosting democracy, ending wars, and economic growth, Africa is the only region in the world becoming less and less able to feed itself.

[snip]

In 1970, sub-Saharan Africa had 18 million malnourished children. By 1997 there were 32 million, according to IFPRI. The global trend, meanwhile, moved in the opposite direction: 203 million hungry children in 1970 down to 166 million in 1997, according to a recent IFPRI report.

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The UN's World Food Programme said that once the harvest begins next month, it will redirect food to concentrate on those most in need. The UN argues this will allow high food prices, caused by shortages, to fall.

But MSF warns that with almost 1m people not yet fed, next month is too soon to end wide-scale distributions. It says that this could put many mothers and children in particular at risk.

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